Well, one thing most people forget is that MOST CRTs can be rehabbed and refurbished. It is labor intensive, but it can be done. I used to have an old Sony CRT projector and when it finally died, I had it refurbished for about $3000. New ones would cost $50,000 (consider it can still do 2048x1920 resolution!) or more, maybe even double that now.
Most public domain software is free, at least at first glance.
Open source will fix it, though (Score:2)